What This Day Can Be Said Of Remorse Poem by Warren Falcon

for Karen Schelling

"The simplest kind of proposition, an elementary proposition, asserts a state of affairs."
- Ludwig Wittgenstein


I live at the bottom of a hill near a
broken fence beside tracks of steel.

On the other side a stream moves upon itself
not confusing itself as ice for rocks alone.

A memory in the sound of water, a dazzle of
sky, takes a silly surface tone from what runs

beneath, outrunning rocks because it can;
desire that force which drives the sand.

The movement of water too is undeniable,
solid in its course though sand, as does water,

knows nothing of remorse.




At the fence I wait. No train yet
which will be a movement too beside
the wet, and these thoughts here.

That you are tissue essential and fabric
to my own particularity.

I send you a sound wonder, a welcome again
to that place you dwell here within,

Time the only disparity.




Snow on Telford gravestones, tall
houses on cupped hills in squared

parcels back lit with sunset's down-light,
juxtapose a Wyeth isolation and beauty

which is the dutiful image of you, heart
breaking through remembering our first meeting.

OR

Which is the dutiful image of you?
Heart broken remembering the first meeting,

then the departing?




The distant gazebo of that small
town wears white lights garlanded

round, and snow. A boy without
gloves reads alone.

He is no fool who takes his time and
place to know.




I rediscover you a gift here still as
I have in good counsel curtsied and coughed

often enough, my own hand to my own groin,
to discover a fissure again, again to repeat,

that you are tissue essential still and
fabric to my own particularity upon a hill,

a house, one fence above a stream and rails,
a blinking boy turning wet pages knows that

you or someone similar, only a few years
ahead, already familiar, dwells inside,

compels his reading just before sunset
squinting at words beyond and past the

fence and the stream, the train late,
footprints dark blue in the patient drift.